The Girl with Seven Names. Hyeonseo Lee
were degrees of privilege, but we were also equal citizens in the best country in the world. The Leaders were dedicating their lives to providing for all of us. Weren’t they?
Schooling in North Korea is free, though in reality parents are perpetually being given quotas for donations of goods, which the school sells to pay for facilities. My friend had not been attending because her parents could not afford these donations. None of us was cynical enough to realize that our schooling was not really free at all. The donations were a patriotic duty – rabbit-fur for the gloves and hats of the soldiers who kept us safe; scrap iron for their guns, copper for their bullets; mushrooms and berries as foreign currency-earning exports. Sometimes a child would be criticized by the teacher in front of the class for not bringing in the quota.
In early 1990, when I was ten years old, my father announced that we were moving again, this time back to Hyesan. My mother had had enough of the pollution and grind of life in Hamhung, and missed her family and the clean air. She did not think an industrial city was a good place to bring up Min-ho. Once again, we looked forward to the move. My parents talked incessantly of Hyesan and of the people there.
We were going home.
Min-ho, my mother, and I all waved goodbye to my father, and to Hamhung, from the train window. My father would follow in a day or two. That journey home would not have stuck in my mind but for a drama we experienced on the way that made a lasting impression on my mother and me.
On the way north we had to change trains at a town called Kil-ju on the east coast. Train stations in North Korea have a rigorous inspection of travellers’ documents, with passengers often having to pass through cordons of police and ticket inspectors. No one can board a train without a travel permit stamped in their ID passbook, together with a train ticket, which is valid for four days only. The documentation is then checked all over again at the destination station. A woman ticket inspector examined my mother’s ticket and told her brusquely that it had expired. She was the type of official most North Koreans are familiar with – a mini Great Leader when in uniform. She took my mother’s ID passbook and ticket and told her to wait.
My mother’s face fell into her hands. Now we had a problem. She would have to get permission from Hamhung again before we could buy new tickets. That would take time and she had two children in tow, and luggage. We were stranded. Min-ho was crying loudly. My mother took him off her back and held him and together we slumped onto a bench inside the station. I held her hand. We must have looked a desolate bunch, because a middle-aged man in the grey cap and uniform of the Korean State Railway came up to us and smiled. He asked what the matter was. My mother explained, and he went to the ticket inspector’s office. The woman was not there, but he brought back my mother’s ticket and ID passbook, and gave them to her.
In a low voice he said: ‘When the train stops, jump on. But if she comes looking for you, hide.’
My mother was so grateful that she asked for his address so that she could send him something.
He held up his palms. ‘No time for that.’
The train was creaking into the station, bringing with it a reek of latrines and soldered steel. It screeched to a stop and the doors began flying open.
We boarded. The carriage was crowded. My mother quickly explained our predicament to the passengers and asked if we could crouch down behind them. Sure enough, a minute later we heard the voice of the ticket inspector, asking people on the platform about us. Next thing we knew she had entered the carriage.
‘Have you seen a woman with a baby and a little girl?’ She was shouting. ‘Did she get on the train?’
‘Yes.’ Two of the passengers in front of us said this in unison. ‘They went that way.’
The woman got off, still looking left and right for us. We heard her asking more people on the platform. We were holding our breath. Why wasn’t the train moving? A minute seemed to pass. Finally we heard the shrill note of a whistle. The train shunted forward, couplings banging together. My mother looked at me and finally exhaled. She’d been terrified Min-ho would start bawling again.
Kindness toward strangers is rare in North Korea. There is risk in helping others. The irony was that by forcing us to be good citizens, the state made accusers and informers of us all. The episode was so unusual that my mother was to recall it many times, saying how thankful she was to that man, and to the passengers. A few years later, when the country entered its darkest period, we would remember him. Kind people who put others before themselves would be the first to die. It was the ruthless and the selfish who would survive.
Our new home in Hyesan was another house allocated to us by the military. Our neighbours were other military officials and their families. The accommodation was good by North Korean standards. It had two rooms and a squat toilet. The heating in the floor was piping hot, making the glue beneath the reja – a kind of linoleum – give off a smell like mushrooms, but the building was poorly insulated. In winter we’d have warm backsides and freezing noses. We had to boil water when we wanted a hot bath.
My mother did her usual makeover, replacing the wallpaper and the furniture. She didn’t mind. She was thrilled to be back in Hyesan and reconnected with our family social circles. We felt settled.
Hyesan had been booming in the years we’d been away. The illicit trade coming over the border from China seemed greater than ever and my mother wanted to get in on some deals. She had found a job with a local government bureau, but her salary, as with all state jobs, was negligible. She wanted to make serious money, like Aunt Pretty, Uncle Money and Uncle Opium.
It seemed that everything was available in Hyesan – from high-value liquor and expensive foreign perfume to Western-brand clothing and Japanese electronics – at a price. Smugglers brought goods from the county of Changbai, on the Chinese side, across the narrow, shallow river for collection by a Korean contact, or across the Changbai–Hyesan International Bridge (known to locals as the Friendship Bridge). Illegal trade across the bridge required bribing the North Korean customs officials; smuggling across the river required bribing the border guards. When the river froze solid in winter smugglers crept over the ice; the rest of the year they waded across at night, or in broad daylight, if the guards at key points had been bribed and were in on the deal.
We could see the prosperity. This would not have been at all obvious to outsiders, since North Koreans are poor and do not wish to draw the state’s attention. Anyone looking across from China would have seen a city in deep blackout at night, with a few kerosene lamps flickering in windows, and a colourless, drab place by day, with people cycling joylessly to work. But the signs were all around us. The special hotel for foreigners, where our parents sometimes took Min-ho and me for an overnight stay as a treat (the manager was a friend of my mother’s), was always full with Chinese business people. In the morning we’d join them for breakfast but never talk to them, in case any informers or Bowibu agents were listening. The city’s dollar store, opposite Hyesan Station, had plenty of customers spending hard currency on goods not obtainable anywhere else, and certainly not through the state’s Public Distribution System. Going there was like being admitted into a magical cavern. I couldn’t believe how brightly the goods were packaged – foreign-made cookies and chocolates in wrappers of silver and purple that made them irresistibly tempting, and fruit juices – orange, apple, grape – in clear bottles marked with Western letters, that came from some faraway land of plenty. Outside the store, a few illegal moneychangers hung about like flies. My mother walked straight past them and would have nothing to do with them, saying they swindled people by wrapping newsprint into a bundle and putting a few genuine notes on top, knowing that anyone illegally trying to change money couldn’t complain. The state beauty parlour was always fully booked, with women having their hair permed (not dyed, which was prohibited), and the state restaurants were doing a roaring trade. Most significantly,